“If it ain’t Walker,” Nevin said. “The big ugly tyrant himself.” “Shut yer trap,” Grant said to him, opening the door for me. Seems there was still bad blood there. “Been told to expect you sooner or later.”
“Wish it were later,” Nevin said as I passed into the sumptuous interior with the tinkle of a bell to announce my entry.
Grant was having none of his brother’s lip. “See you, I’m gonna–”, his words were cut off as the heavy door slammed shut, leaving me to admire the fine oil paintings until Layla herself appeared, dressed in a soft grey silk dress and silver necklace studded with sapphires instead of her usual more functional garb. Her hair was short and spiky and showed off the silver hoops in her ears nicely.
I whistled softly. “Entertaining are we?” “None of your business, you disgusting old letch.” She gave me a twirl. “How do I look?”
She looked better than I dared admit. “Beautiful. Who is the lucky git? What do they do for a living?”
“It really is none of your business,” she replied. “You don’t have the right to take the protective uncle stance with me.”
I held my hands up in surrender. “Fair enough. I’m just here for my chest.”
She slipped the key into my hand. “I assumed so. Help yourself. Good luck up north.”
“Seems everybody knows now. I guess bad news travels fast.” She smiled and patted my shoulder. “If all Clansfolk are half as troublesome as Grant and Nevin then you’ll need it.” I pulled a face and she laughed.
“At least keep a weapon handy,” I said. “Can’t be too careful these days.”
She smiled again, but this time it didn’t touch her eyes. “I am a weapon, Walker.” With that she waved me onwards and climbed the stairs to return to her man, or woman come to that. I realised that I didn’t have the faintest idea about her personal life. I suffered sudden and extreme curiosity: what sort of exceptional person had raised such emotion in Layla of all people? And should I threaten to hurt them if they stepped out of line? Huh, feeling protective were we? Interesting. If I still cared about a few things then I was not completely lost.
It was mightily tempting to meddle and go find out, but I bested it and descended to the cellar instead. I was just jealous of her happiness, needled by the knowledge I would probably never have that myself. Still, life goes on despite all the crap the world throws at us. I dusted off my old heartwood chest and examined the arcane wards I’d set to protect it. They were already decayed and useless, their intricate arcane structures eroded away by the raging power contained inside. I cracked the chest open and white light flooded the room, a liquid spilling of magic that seduced my Gift and sizzled against my mind.
Inside the chest lay a blinding shard of crystal that beat with the most potent magics imaginable – a god-seed, ripped from the living heart of a corrupted god. My gloved hands trembled as I picked it up and gazed deep into the faceted depths. I had almost forgotten how right it felt to hold this. My whole body itched and sparked with stray power, and the Worm of Magic urged me to take it, to subsume its power and ascend to godhood. My hands trembled on the edge of stabbing the shard directly into my heart.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “And be chained here forever? Sod that. Bloody gods and their stinking arrogance.”
I slipped the shard into the inside pocket of my coat and gave it a pat. There must come a day when you grow weary of the world and just want to sleep and never wake, but from what I’d gleaned of the gods of Setharis there was some horrible, endless duty involved meaning no time to relax and enjoy all that lovely power. I wasn’t all about the duty. I was a lazy bastard at the best of times. This power and this responsibility were not meant for the likes of me, but nor could I leave it lying about for any old piece of pond scum to pick up and wield. The god-seed wanted to be found and needed to be used, it would find somebody sooner or later. That was probably how a rat-hearted bastard like Nathair had got a hold of it in the first place.
I couldn’t protect the god-seed while I was away, or if I died, and I dared not risk taking such a potent artefact anywhere near the Skallgrim and Scarrabus. Which left me only two choices.
To become a really crappy god myself, or to choose somebody experienced that might make a half-decent one. Only two sprung to mind, and I reckoned Old Gerthan was too focused on healing people to want any other job. Which left somebody that I really, really dreaded becoming a god. Even being mostly dead, she still scared the piss out of me.
Here it was, the point where that sliver of trust I had earned with the Arcanum was torn up and burned before my eyes.
I stood before Shadea’s black metal tomb and searched again for any sign of thought inside. Nothing that I could sense, and yet there was still an odd vibration in the aether. Elder magi did not die easily, and she was one of the most potent to ever live.
I was never one for pointless ceremony. I yanked the shard of pulsing crystal from my pocket and stuffed the god-seed deep into a crack in the metal shell, then hammered it in further through metal and strands of flesh. The room filled with stray magic that began lapping across the entire foundation floor of the Collegiate. It wouldn’t be long until the other magi felt it, and already those with the seer’s Gift would know something was amiss down here.
I hadn’t dared tell the Arcanum what I was up to of course; they would never let something this powerful out of their hands, not until some power-hungry prick stole it. As they would. Such power was far too tempting. The Arcanum’s previous archmagus, Byzant, was a living example of that – that fucking Hooded God… I’d happily kill him too if I could.
“Come on Shadea. Wake up and absorb the damn crystal will you! Think of what you can learn, eh, lots of juicy secrets beyond the ken of mere mortals.”
A door opened and worried voices trooped into Shadea’s quarters. I booted her metal tomb. “Hurry up, you ugly old hag! Want me to go piss on all your scrolls and take a great steaming shite on your antique mahogany desk? I swear I’ll do it.”
I turned at an intake of breath to see a pack of armed magi racing towards me. I fumbled for Cillian’s writ, “Er, I can explain everything.” Sometimes a paper shield was just paper.
At which point an irresistible force picked me up and slammed me face-first into the wall. Oh shite, it’s happening. Shite shite shite… The other magi stumbled back and erected walls of stone, water and air as raw magic blazed white-hot against my Gift. Enchanted black iron that had resisted repeated blows from the most dreadful creature ever known to man cracked like an egg and ran like molten wax to sizzle on the floor, revealing a nightmare amalgam of flesh and metal inside.
I could only glimpse it from the corner of my eye, but whatever was left of Shadea was not even remotely human. Shreds of flesh and steel, bone and cable, blood and lubricant churned in a sphere around a human skull pierced by a halo of golden wires.
Her voice rang and reverberated, metallic and inhuman. “Boy.” “Shadea?” “Dare to ruin my research and I will rip your lungs from your body.”
I laughed, a wheezing gasp. “I feel the call to duty,” she said. “Power. So immense. Such… effort. The chains that bind. Ah, Byzant, we shall have words, you and I.” Her attention focused on me like I was an insect and she a glass lens held up to the sun. “I feel you, Edrin Walker…and your pacted daemon. When the time comes do not run from the joining. Fight or be consumed.”
That small place in the back of my skull where the last part of Dissever still lurked throbbed in response. Something passed between nascent god and fragment of deadly daemon.